'Apocalypse Now' from 1979 portrays pure evil | Reading Eagle - VOICES Voices | Marlon Brando in a scene from "Apocalypse Now." 'Apocalypse Now' from 1979 portrays pure evil Tuesday November 24, 2015 12:01 AM Steven Kuipers The majesty of film, the horror of war. How can two such opposing things blend seamlessly into a story? The answer is unclear as I reflect upon Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 masterpiece, "Apocalypse Now." The movie's story is based on Joseph Conrad's literary classic "Heart of Darkness." In the book, Charles Marlow is assigned by his employers to travel up the Congo River to retrieve the mysterious and infamous Capt. Kurtz. Not much is known about Kurtz, only that he is revered among his peers and possesses a quality of savagery. "Apocalypse Now" tells a similar story, just set during the Vietnam War. Special Operations veteran Ben Willard (Martin Sheen) is assigned to assassinate the rogue Capt. Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who is AWOL (absent without leave).

Commanders believe that Kurtz has established himself as a "demi-god" among the Vietnamese natives, and he rules his territory with inhumane methods. Having accepted the mission, Willard boards the Navy patrol boat and begins his journey up the Nyong River to find him. I understand the need for underbudgeted, artistically independent projects and how they impact film culture. But high-budget studio projects can be just as impactful. "Apocalypse Now" is a grand production. Never before have I seen such a layered movie with such attention to detail. The movie is covered in authenticity, featuring real helicopters, real native people, real animals and real battles. This detail is what solidifies "Apocalypse Now" as a smash hit for its time, and an epic war movie for all time. The movie still is talked about today, and people who have seen it will never forget it. It stands the test of time because it dares to layer itself. The more you dig into the movie, the more you discover. Willard's journey into the jungle is an analogy for the journey to finding our broken nature.

As Willard ascends the river and into the heart of the war, he begins to see the deterioration of humanity and the acceptance of savagery. The movie shows how even civilized American soldiers will commit unspeakable sins if isolated enough. In the jungle of Vietnam, morality isn't in the picture. And the deeper the crew gets, the worse it becomes. Finally, at the heart of the jungle, the crew reaches Capt. Kurtz: the manifestation of evil itself. Unchecked and unauthorized, Kurtz is free to do whatever he pleases, and it's not a pretty sight. Bodies and heads hang just about everywhere, and fresh blood paves the temple grounds. Kurtz is in complete and utter control, and no one wants to question him. Even with its imagery, the movie remains ambiguous enough to allow theory and discussion. It's like a great piece of literature, leaving ideas in the open for discussion, and providing enough evidence to support any argument.

TODAY'S SPONSOR: Conrad & Coppola Heart of Darkness & Apocalypse Now: A comparative analysis of novella and film In the opening scenes of the documentary film "Hearts of Darkness-A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," Eleanor Coppola describes her husband Francis's film, "Apocalypse Now," as being "loosely based" on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Indeed, "loosely" is the word; the period, setting, and circumstances of the film are totally different from those of the novella. The question, therefore, is whether any of Conrad's classic story of savagery and madness is extant in its cinematic reworking. It is this question that I shall attempt to address in this brief monograph by looking more closely at various aspects of character, plot, and theme in each respective work. The story of Heart of Darkness is narrated by its central character, the seasoned mariner Marlowe, a recurring figure in Conrad's work. "Apocalypse Now" features a corollary to Marlowe in Captain Willard, a U.S.

Army special forces operative assigned to go up the Nung river from Viet Nam into Cambodia in order to "terminate the command" of one Colonel Walter Kurtz whom, he is told, has gone totally insane. It is fitting that Marlowe's character should be renamed, as Willard differs from Marlowe in several significant ways: 1) He is not the captain of the boat which takes him and a party of others up the river; 2) He does not reflect the deep psychological and philosophical insights that are a signal feature in Marlowe's character, and 3) He is sent on his mission specifically to kill Kurtz, unlike Marlowe who is simply piloting others in the capacity of captain of a steamboat. However, Willard does communicate Marlowe's fascination (growing, in fact, into an obsession) with Kurtz. Also significant is the fact that he holds the rank of captain, tying in with Marlowe's occupation. As to the character of Kurtz, it is worth noting that while significant discrepancies exist between the depictions of Conrad and Coppola, the basic nature of the man remains fairly similar.

The idea of company man turned savage, of a brilliant and successful team-player, being groomed by "the Company" for greater things, suddenly gone native, is perfectly realized in both novella and film. In the film, Kurtz is portrayed by Marlon Brando, the father of American method actors, who lends weight (both physically and dramatically) to the figure of the megalomaniacal Kurtz. Brando's massive girth is all the more ironic for those familiar with Heart of Darkness who recall Conrad's description: "I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arms waving. It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men..." [1]. One could speculate that Coppola's Kurtz is a graphic analogy of the bloated American war machine dominating and perverting the innocent montegnards of Cambodia; however, after viewing Eleanor Coppola's documentary, one finds that the casting was more based on a combination of Coppola's wanting to work with Brando (remember "The Godfather") and Brando's own weight problem.

(It should also be noted that the cult-like following of Kurtz in _______________ [1] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1978), p. 135, Heart of Darkness is brilliantly and subtly updated by Coppola in a foreshadowing scene in which missives to Willard from headquarters are intercut with scenes of newspaper clippings about Charles Manson.) Also present in Coppola's film is the loveable, addle-headed harlequin/fool figure who meets Marlowe's boat upon arrival at Kurtz's station. This role is rendered in grand, demented style by Dennis Hopper, replete with a plethora of cameras (he is an American photojournalist) to update his fool's motley. Much of his dialogue is taken directly from Conrad, although his character does not flee the scene as does his doppelganger in Heart of Darkness. Regarding plot, as stated earlier, Coppola's rendering of Heart of Darkness diverges wildly from Conrad.

Conrad's story depicts a turn of the century riverboat captain transporting members of an unnamed "Company," an ivory trading concern, up a snake-like river winding its way into the Belgian Congo in order to locate their top "agent" and relieve him of his independently-stockpiled ivory. The Company has judged Kurtz to be a renegade whose methods are "unsound." Coppola's film gives us Willard, an Army captain who is sent by Army intelligence up a similar river in Viet Nam to kill a certain Colonel Kurtz. Again, Colonel Kurtz is considered by the parties in charge to be insane, his methods unsound (a direct dialogue echo from the text.) This last fact, however, that Willard is from the beginning an assassin, is a fundamental difference between the film and the book. It changes the whole psychological dynamic between that of Marlowe and Kurtz. In Conrad, Marlowe is in awe of Kurtz, comes to identify with him in some dark recess of his own psyche; Willard, on the other hand, is more impressed with Kurtz's credentials than moved by his force of mind and will.

His mission to kill Kurtz gives him some measure of pause, but his military protocol mentality ultimately rules the day. Compared with Marlowe's deep, searching ruminations on the dark, enigmatic Kurtz, Willard is a government-issue automaton. Add to this the fact that the first two thirds of the movie "Apocalypse Now" are concerned with the Viet Nam war and have absolutely nothing to do with the plot of Heart of Darkness, and it seems as if there is an unmendable rift between the film and its purported inspiration. To be fair, however, it is important to mention that the two plots do converge at the point just before the boat parties arrive at Kurtz's station, when a thick fog envelops each boat and a rain of arrows showers down on the passengers. From here we witness the death of the black helmsman by a spear, the greeting of the fool figure, and, finally the meeting with the mad Kurtz. Which brings us to the question of theme.

The dominant theme of Heart of Darkness is man's vulnerability to his own darker nature and the various ways in which this terrible, savage, proto-man can be unleashed; power, the jungle, "the Company," all serve as catalysts for the emergence of this hidden, voracious id-thing within us all, most realized in Kurtz. In "Apocalypse Now," Coppola is right on target in exploring this theme, his choice of Viet Nam in the sixties providing all the requisite elements: power, the jungle, and "the Company" are all present, the latter being represented by the U.S. Army, or perhaps the U.S.A. as a whole. This last touch is ingenious, as it calls up a whole series of speculations regarding the various forms of imperialism. In Conrad, set at the turn of the century, the imperialism is traditional, overt. In Coppola, the U.S. presence is just as overt, yet the pretense upon which it is based is more ideological, geopolitical. Both situations provide the possibility for endless abuse of power by foreigners in a primitive jungle setting, a setting which tends to bend their minds and release their dormant savage energies.

Heart of Darkness depicts gun-crazy members of "the Company" firing wildly upon anything and everything as they progress up the river. Likewise the men in the PBR in "Apocalypse Now," even more so, in fact, due to the circumstances of the Viet Nam war. The ultimate extreme of man's dark side, as explored in Conrad and Coppola, is madness. The embodiment of this madness is Kurtz, and it is explored more thoroughly, in fact, in Coppola. One might argue that no credit is to be given to Coppola for this, that so many men went mad in Viet Nam, that the war was madness itself. But the way in which Kurtz's madness is portrayed must be examined: the way Brando is filmed in perpetual half-shadow, as if darkness is pouring over him in some black ooze; the strange, nonsensical yet at the same time compelling ruminations he shares with Willard; the scene in which he beheads one of Willard's men and presents the trophy to Willard in full camouflage make-up. These are examples of the filmmaker's craft and should not be overlooked.

To sum up, the question must be answered as to whether Conrad's Heart of Darkness has survived the passage of seventy-five years and a cinematic treatment by Francis Ford Coppola. I would say yes, in its basic thematic elements, it has. Much has changed, but the basic feel of the novella, the brooding, mysterious jungle energy, its maddening influence over those who would try to tame it, and Kurtz, whose soul went mad, whose last words were "The horror, the horror," all remain relatively in tact. I wonder what Conrad would have thought. ©1996 Patrick Galloway SparkNotes: Apocalypse Now: Context Apocalypse Now Table of Contents Plot Overview Apocalypse Now (1979), one of the most important films to emerge from the Vietnam War era, took ten years and more than $30 million to make. Director Francis Ford Coppola struggled with setback after setback during production and constantly questioned his work on the film, to the point of threatening suicide. Because the film was shot in the Philippines and financed largely outside of the Hollywood studio system, it acquired a certain mystery among the media. By the time of its release, it had become almost mythical in stature.

Apocalypse Now is based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s 1898 novella Heart of Darkness, the story of a ship captain’s journey up the Congo River during the heyday of European imperialism in Africa. Conrad’s novella follows Marlow’s quest to find Kurtz, an ivory trader and philosopher whose intentions to enlighten the African natives fail as he gives in to the jungle’s savage temptations and ultimately goes insane. Orson Welles worked to adapt the novella for the screen in 1939, but his studio feared the production would go over budget and backed off the project. Welles ended up making Citizen Kane instead. In 1969, Coppola founded American Zoetrope with young filmmaker George Lucas, hoping to create a film company that could be financially and creatively independent from the conservative, restrictive Hollywood studio system. Among the first projects they sought to complete was Apocalypse Now, an original screenplay by John Milius based on Heart of Darkness but updated to take place in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Lucas hoped to direct the film, but they were unable to secure financing.

At the time, the American antiwar movement was gaining power, as citizens became increasingly bitter and resentful about the United States’ role in the war. Executives were reluctant to release a Vietnam-related film amid such a volatile social context. The project was shelved as Coppola and Lucas put the almost-bankrupt American Zoetrope on hold. Meanwhile, Coppola directed The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974), which together went on to win nine Academy Awards and make Coppola a multimillionaire. With his new wealth, he revisited his plans for an independent filmmaking company and again chose Apocalypse Now to spearhead the reemergence of American Zoetrope. When Coppola took up the film for the second time at age thirty-six, he had seven feature films under his belt and was the winner of six Academy Awards. Apocalypse Now, however, was to be his most ambitious film in terms of both vision and scale—he felt prepared to create an epic movie that would capture the totality of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was fought from 1959 to 1975.

South Vietnamese independence was at stake, as the war’s outcome would determine whether North and South Vietnam would be unified under communist North Vietnamese rule. The United States became involved in the conflict because its policymakers feared the spread of communism. China and much of Eastern Europe were already under communist control, and U.S. leaders felt they could not “lose” Southeast Asia as well. The United States helped install an anticommunist prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, in South Vietnam in1954. When Diem was killed in a military coup in 1963, the United States became more directly involved in the war. The first U.S. combat troops were sent to Vietnam in 1965. With conscription in effect, the U.S. military drafted increasing numbers of young men to serve as the war progressed. The average age of a U.S. soldier in Vietnam was nineteen, and the majority were youths from the poorer sections of American society. By 1968, about 40,000 young men were drafted each month to meet demands for increased troops in Vietnam. Opposition to the war within the United States developed even before troops were deployed, but its scope was relatively narrow.

As the war progressed, an unprecedented antiwar movement emerged in America. Millions participated in protests, teach-ins, and riots. The movement was fueled by public confusion as to the reasons for the U.S. invasion; increasing draft numbers; the Kent State University protest, in which National Guardsmen shot four students dead; and the 1969 revelation of the My Lai Massacre, in which a U.S. Army division killed some five hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians. Accounts of government deception and secret bombings further aggravated the flame of dissent rippling through America. By 1971, 70 percent of Americans sought the immediate withdrawal of American troops, and a majority thought the war was a mistake. Many U.S. soldiers in Vietnam also opposed the war and the draft, resulting in internal dissension, low morale, and an increasing number of soldiers going AWOL, or absent without leave. In January 1973, all parties involved in the Vietnamese conflict came together to sign the Treaty of Paris. The treaty’s terms provided for, among other things, a cease-fire between North and South Vietnam and the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from South Vietnam. The last U.S.

troops left Vietnam on March 29, 1973, after nearly 58,000 young soldiers had died and more than 300,000 had been wounded. Filming for Apocalypse Now began in February 1976. Coppola was able to secure a large area in the Philippines as the setting for the film shoot. The humid, typhoon-prone climate and dense vegetation provided a convincing substitute for Vietnam’s sticky, thick jungles. Coppola made every effort to re-create accurately the atmosphere, character, and action of the Vietnam War. As he said famously in a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival: “My film is not a movie. It is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.” Apocalypse Now was released in 1979, after it spent two years in the editing room being painfully whittled down from six hours to two and a half. By its release date, the film had been delayed for so long it had become the butt of many media jokes, spurring headlines that screamed “Apocalypse Never.” Upon its highly anticipated release, the film received mostly superlative reviews, and the bulk of critics considered it a flawed masterpiece.

It took home the top award at the Cannes Film Festival and won two Academy Awards, for Best Cinematography and Best Sound, out of eight nominations. Coppola, who had never been happy with the final cut of the film, in 2001 released Apocalypse Now Redux, which restored forty-nine minutes of scenes deleted from the original film. The new version received mixed reviews, but the original is still widely recognized as Coppola’s most ambitious, far-reaching work and the king of Vietnam War movies. Thesis Statement on "Heart of Darkness" and "Apocalypse Now" | Category: Law & Government Category: / Law & Government Length: 5 pages (1366 words) The Heart of Darkness collides with Apocalypse Now Francis Ford Coppola 1979 film Apocalypse Now is based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Conrad's Heart of Darkness focuses on the ivory trade taking place in Africa, while Apocalypse Now takes place during the Vietnam War. The main character in both the film and story is Kurtz. Kurtz refers to "the horror" in both the film and story, in both Kurtz sees a horror in the people Is this Essay helpful?

Join now to read this particular paper and access over 480,000 just like this GET BETTER GRADES Kurtz in both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now broke away from his original self and became a person he didn't intend to be. Nevertheless Kurtz transformed in both the movie or story and became a ruthless character. Work Cited: Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Coppola. With Martin Sheen, Robert Duval, And Marlon Brando. Zeotrope, 1979. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Rpt. in The Short Story and Its Writers. Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003. 108-13 Need a custom written paper? Let our professional writers save your time. Our writers are from respected universities What is Paper-Research? Paper-Research offers pre-written essays, term papers, book reports, and research papers on a great variety of topics that will diversify your writing and help improve your grade.

Create Account SERVICES Apocalypse Now Movie Review & Film Summary (1979) | Roger Ebert Tweet Francis Ford Coppola's film "Apocalypse Now" was inspired by Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad about a European named Kurtz who penetrated to the farthest reaches of the Congo and established himself like a god. A boat sets out to find him, and on the journey the narrator gradually loses confidence in orderly civilization; he is oppressed by the great weight of the jungle all around him, a pitiless Darwinian testing ground in which each living thing tries every day not to be eaten. Advertisement What is found at the end of the journey is not Kurtz so much as what Kurtz found: that all of our days and ways are a fragile structure perched uneasily atop the hungry jaws of nature that will thoughtlessly devour us. A happy life is a daily reprieve from this knowledge. A week ago I was in Calcutta, where I saw mile upon square mile of squatter camps in which hundreds of thousands live generation after generation in leaky huts of plastic, cardboard and scrap metal, in poverty so absolute it is impossible to see any hope of escape.

I do not mean to equate the misery of those hopeless people with a movie; that would be indecent. But I was deeply shaken by what I saw, and realized how precious and precarious is a happy life. And in such a mood I watched "Apocalypse Now" and came to the scene where Col. Kurtz ( Marlon Brando ) tells Capt. Willard ( Martin Sheen ) about "the horror." Kurtz is a decorated hero, one of the best soldiers in the Army, who has created a jungle sanctuary upriver inside enemy territory, and rules Montagnard tribesmen as his private army. He tells Willard about a day when his Special Forces men inoculated the children of a village against polio: "This old man came running after us and he was crying, he couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms. . . ." Advertisement What Kurtz learned is that the Viet Cong were willing to go to greater lengths to win: "Then I realized they were stronger than we. They have the strength, the strength to do that.

If I had 10 divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment." This is the "horror" that Kurtz has found, and it threatens to envelop Willard, too. The whole movie is a journey toward Willard's understanding of how Kurtz, one of the Army's best soldiers, penetrated the reality of war to such a depth that he could not look any longer without madness and despair. The film has one of the most haunting endings in cinema, a poetic evocation of what Kurtz has discovered, and what we hope not to discover for ourselves. The river journey creates enormous anticipation about Kurtz, and Brando fulfills it. When the film was released in 1979, his casting was criticized and his enormous paycheck of $1 million was much discussed, but it's clear he was the correct choice, not only because of his stature as an icon, but because of his voice, which enters the film from darkness or half-light, repeating the words of T.S.

Eliot's despairing "The Hollow Men." That voice sets the final tone of the film. Advertisement Another crucial element in the ending is the photojournalist ( Dennis Hopper ) who has somehow found Kurtz's camp and stayed there, stoned, as a witness. He blathers to Willard that Kurtz is "a poet-warrior in the classic sense" and "we're all his children." In the photographer's spaced-out ravings we hear disconnected snatches of the poetry he must have heard Kurtz reciting: If you can keep your head when all about you . . . I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floor of a silent sea. . . ." The photographer is the guide, the clown, the fool, providing the balance between Willard and Kurtz. Why has "Apocalypse Now" been so long bedeviled by rumors that Coppola was not happy with this ending? At the film's premiere at Cannes, I saw the confusion begin. Coppola originally intended to show the movie as a 70mm roadshow with no credits (they would be printed in a booklet). But the 35mm release would need end titles.

After he was finished filming on the huge set of the Kurtz compound, Coppola was required by the Philippine government to destroy it, and he photographed it being blown up. He decided to use this footage over his closing 35mm credits, even though (this is crucial) he did not intend the destruction of the compound as an alternative "ending" to the film. Alas, confusion about the endings spread from Cannes into movie folklore, and most people thought that by "ending" he meant all of the material involving Kurtz. In the 20th anniversary DVD release, Coppola patiently explains all of this once again. In any event, seen again now at a distance of 20 years, "Apocalypse Now" is more clearly than ever one of the key films of the century. Most films are lucky to contain a single great sequence. "Apocalypse Now" strings together one after another, with the river journey as the connecting link. The best is the helicopter attack on a Vietnam village, led by Col. Kilgore ( Robert Duvall ), whose choppers use loudspeakers at top volume to play Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" as they swoop down on a yard full of schoolchildren.

Duvall won an Oscar nomination for his performance and its unforgettable line, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." His emptiness is frightening: A surfing fanatic, he agrees to the attack only to liberate a beach said to offer great waves ("Charlie don't surf"). Advertisement There is also the sequence where the patrol boat stops a small fishing boat with a family on board. A little girl makes a sudden dash, and the jumpy machine-gunner (a young Laurence Fishburne ) opens fire, wiping out the entire family. It turns out the girl was running for her puppy. The mother is not quite dead. The boat chief ( Albert Hall ) wants to take her for medical treatment. Willard puts a bullet into her; nothing can delay his mission. He and "Chief" are the only two seasoned military men on the boat, trying to do things by the book; later, in a scene with peculiar power, the chief is astonished to be killed by a spear. For me the most remarkable visuals in the film occur when Chef (Fredric Forrest), one of Willard's crew members, insists on venturing into the forest in search of mangos. Willard can't stop him, so he joins him.

The great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro shows them as little human specks at the foot of towering trees, and this is a Joseph Conrad moment, showing how nature dwarfs us. The rock 'n' roll soundtrack opens and closes with "The End" by the Doors, and includes disc jockeys on transistor radios ("Good morning, Vietnam!"). The music underlines surrealistic moments, as when Lance ( Sam Bottoms ), one of Willard's crew, water-skis behind the boat. It also shows how the soldiers try to use the music of home, and booze and drugs, to ease their loneliness and apprehension. Advertisement Other important films such as " Platoon ," " The Deer Hunter ," " Full Metal Jacket " and " Casualties of War " take their own approaches to Vietnam. Once at the Hawaii Film Festival I saw five North Vietnamese films about the war. (They never mentioned "America," only "the enemy," and one director told me, "It is all the same--we have been invaded by China, France, the U.S. . .

.") But "Apocalypse Now" is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul. It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover. In a way I cannot quite explain, my thoughts since Calcutta prepared me to understand the horror that Kurtz found. If we are lucky, we spend our lives in a fool's paradise, never knowing how close we skirt the abyss. What drives Kurtz mad is his discovery of this. Note: In my original review of "Apocalypse Now" I quoted the French director Francois Truffaut : "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between." Coppola's joy and agony are revealed in "Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," a 1991 documentary by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper about the making of "Apocalypse Now," with personal footage and journal entries by Coppola's wife, Eleanor, who made secret recordings of Coppola expressing his doubts and discouragement as the project threatened to swamp him.

Advertisement Heart of Darkness | Define Heart of Darkness at Dictionary.com Heart of Darkness a short novel (1902) by Joseph Conrad. Dictionary.com Unabridged Heart of Darkness in Culture Expand Heart of Darkness definition (1902) A short novel by Joseph Conrad . It concerns a seafarer, Marlow, who is sent to the interior of Africa in search of a “mad adventurer” named Kurtz. The book's title refers both to the location of the story and to the evil and darkness in people's hearts. Note: Francis Ford Coppola based his 1979 film Apocalypse Now on a version of Conrad's story set during the Vietnam War . He released a newly edited version, Apocalypse Now Redux, in 2001. The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. People invent new words all the time, but which ones actually make it?

Word of the Day Apocalypse Now Redux Review 1979 | Movie Review | Contactmusic.com Apocalypse Now Redux Review By Rich Cline Just issued on a remastered DVD, Coppola's 1979 masterpiece gets the director's cut treatment in this Redux version, as 49 minutes of previously edited footage are reinserted to bring the film in line with the director's original vision. And the result is stunning, making an astonishing film even more powerful ... but changing it completely in the process. The story, based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, centres on Captain Willard (Sheen), a US Army intelligence officer with a mission to travel into Cambodia and terminate ("with extreme prejudice") the command of the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Brando). Along the way he bonds with the crew (Forrest, Bottoms, Fishburne and Hall) of the boat taking him up-river as they encounter a gung-ho surfing colonel (Duvall), a sexy French woman (Clement), a few Playboy Bunnies, a free-wheeling journalist (Hopper) and more war-time horrors than they could have imagined.

This has always been a magical, gruelling, brilliant movie, so it's surprising that Coppola has tampered with it in such significant ways. But he says this was his original intent - less a war movie and more a film about truth and restraint, which more closely echoes Conrad's novel. In this sense, the new edit is a triumph, because the film's numbing chaos is now much more finely focussed on these themes, even if the story itself is more rambling. Diversions into two new scenes now break up the narrative; a second sequence involving the Bunnies sits nicely in the story, while an extended detour to a French plantation brings the plot to a haunting halt but sets up the final thematic cataclysm more sharply. Other insertions add a much-needed camaraderie among the boat crew, which makes their transformation into "hollow men" much more evocative. And unnerving political discussions about government and media misinformation create a clearer context; these were ahead of their time in 1979, but they're pop-culture today. All of these changes have not altered the film's genius.

It's still stunningly beautiful to look at, remarkably moving and horrific, and jammed with memorable characters in unforgettable situations. Coppola's direction is impeccable, capturing both the intimate detail, overarching spectacle and layered depth of meaning, often all in one shot. All without a single digital special effect! This is essential, must-see cinema. And this so-called "definitive" edit hits us even more squarely between the eyes.

Facts and Figures The 100 best novels: No 32 – Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) | Books | The Guardian The 100 best novels The 100 best novels: No 32 – Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) Joseph Conrad's masterpiece about a life-changing journey in search of Mr Kurtz has the simplicity of great myth Monday 28 April 2014 02.00 EDT First published on Monday 28 April 2014 02.00 EDT Share on Messenger Close So far, on this list, with the possible exception of Alice in Wonderland (No 18 in this series) , Heart of Darkness is probably the title that has aroused, and continues to arouse, most literary critical debate, not to say polemic. This is partly because the story it tells has the visceral simplicity of great myth, and also because the book takes its narrator (Charles Marlow), and the reader, on a journey into the heart of Africa.

Our encounter with Marlow's life-changing journey begins on the Thames in London, the great imperial capital, with his recollection of "the uttermost ends of the Earth". With brilliant economy, Conrad transports him to Congo on a quest that the writer himself undertook as a young man. There, working for the shadowy, but all-powerful "Company", Marlow hears of Mr Kurtz, who is described as a first-class Company servant. Once in the dark continent, Marlow is sent upriver to make contact with Kurtz, who is said to be very ill, and also to safeguard the security of the Inner Station. What he finds, after a gruelling journey to the interior, is a fellow European, who may or may not have gone mad, and who is worshipped as a god by the natives of the primitive interior. Kurtz, however, has paid a terrible price for his mastery. When Marlow finds him on his deathbed, he utters the famous and enigmatic last words: "The horror! The horror!" This line is often said to refer to the atrocities Conrad himself witnessed in Congo as it suffered under the colonial administration of the Belgians.

He himself is said to have remarked that his story was based on "experience, pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case". The metaphorical force of the story and the indifferent contempt of the African who announces "Mistah Kurtz – He dead" (brilliantly expropriated by TS Eliot) gives Heart of Darkness the most modern air of all the books that make up the movement called Modernism. Welcome to the 20th century, possibly English and American fiction's golden age. A note on the text Conrad's first and second languages were Polish and French, with his third language, English, not acquired until he was 20. English, however, was the medium he adopted to explore his youthful experience as a riverboat captain in Belgian Congo. Part of the work's strange hallucinatory atmosphere comes from the writer's struggle with a language that was not his mother tongue. He sometimes said he would have preferred to be a French novelist, and that English was a language without "clean edges". He once complained that "all English words are instruments for exciting blurred emotions". This, paradoxically, is perhaps what gives the book its famously enigmatic, and ambiguous, atmosphere.

Conrad finished writing Heart of Darkness on 9 February 1899. It was originally published as a three-part serialisation in Blackwood's Magazine from February to April 1899 (a commission for the 1,000th issue of the magazine), where it was promoted as a nautical tale by a writer whose work was at first (mistakenly) associated with the sea. Heart of Darkness comes down to us in three other primary texts: a manuscript, a typescript and the final, revised version published in 1902. Not exactly a long story, and certainly not a novella, at barely 38,000 words long, it first appeared in volume form as part of a collection of stories that included Youth: A Narrative and The End of the Tether. It has become Conrad's most famous, controversial and influential work. The English and American writers who fell under its spell include TS Eliot (The Waste Land), Graham Greene (A Burnt-out Case), George Orwell ( Nineteen-Eighty-Four ) and William Golding (The Inheritors) .

It also inspired the Francis Ford Coppola 1979 film Apocalypse Now, a work of homage that continues to renew the contemporary fascination with the text. None of Conrad's other books have inspired such veneration, especially in America, though some (including me) might want to place Nostromo (1904) higher up the pantheon. Critics have endlessly debated it. Chinua Achebe denounced it , in a famous 1975 lecture, as the work of "a bloody racist". Among the novels in this series, few novels occupy such an unassailable place on the list. It is a haunting, hypnotic masterpiece by a great writer who towers over the literature of the 20th century. Three more from Joseph Conrad Nostromo (1904); The Secret Agent (1907); Under Western Eyes (1911).

Question: The 1979 film 'Apocalypse Now* was based on which story by Joseph Conrad?
Answer: Heart of Darkness